I always look for metaphors that will help me teach my kids the hard lessons that are sometimes a challenge to get throught their heads. Adventurous trips almost always provide these, and this spring breakthe California coast did not disappoint.
There we were, back in the trees behind Highway 1 in Big Sur, wending our way between the redwoods on the Valley View Trail in Pfeiffer State Park, going straight up to something, we weren’t quite sure what. After a mile or so of the 3.4 mile loop we hadn’t realized was quite so steep, Oscar sat down.
“I don’t want to do it,” he said. “I’m tired. And bored.”
I grimly recalled another hike where I’d waited with Osc making fairy houses out of moss and bark while Big G and Eli went ahead to see the view. I didn’t relish that happening again. I wanted to move forward, not back. He was older now, and fully capable. So I didn’t stop.
“Come on,” I said. “It’s a loop. You have to go up to come down.”
Of course, this was a slight mistruth. We could have gone right back the way we’d come. So I amended.
“It’s more fun not to go back the same way we came up. Come on.”
Mercifully, the boy stood up and trudged forward. His father generously agreed to carry him a bit, and then he held my hand, letting me pull him like a tow rope. Fun. When he made it all the way up, he stood proudly with his brother in the strange sunny dirt ridge of the apex.
“You did it!” I said as my sister and I caught up. His energy had surged toward the top, while ours had waned.
Oscar stuck out his tongue at me, as he is wont to do when praised. And that was the last I saw of him for a while. Along with his brother and Big G, who felt it best to follow, he ran at high speed all the way down — except for the parts (they told me later) where they went off-trail to scale down the slippery rocky mountainside.
They’d waded in the lake, reveled in the sun on a rock. They probably made it in half my time.
“Good job guys!” I reiterated when finally we reunited by the big hollowed-out redwood.
Upon our return to Brooklyn, thinking I could use the “things aren’t so hard as they seem” logic I’d believed the hike had raised up in order to wake Osc up post red-eye to do homework, I prompted him.
“Wasn’t the hike fun?”
Oscar shook his head.
“No,” he said. His defiant tone said he hadn’t changed his position and he wasn’t just going to lie to please me.
“Climbing up wasn’t fun at all,” he said. He paused for a moment, as if that’s all there was to the story, then added nonchalantly, as if it was an afterthought:
“But the running down was really fun!” He smiled just recalling it.
“Yes. But you couldn’t run down if you hadn’t climbed up, now could you, smarty?”
He wasn’t really paying me his full attention except to shoot me with his laser tag gun. So I said it even more clearly, the Lesson of Big Sur:
“Sometimes you have to do something you don’t like in order to get to do something you love,” I said, loud and clear. “That, my friend, is life.”
I’m sure he heard me through his burping of the ABCs. I’m positive. And I’m not at all worried. I imagine I’ll repeat that vacation teaching moment a million times.
To myself and to my kids.
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